Book Image

Windows Terminal Tips, Tricks, and Productivity Hacks

By : Will Fuqua
5 (1)
Book Image

Windows Terminal Tips, Tricks, and Productivity Hacks

5 (1)
By: Will Fuqua

Overview of this book

Windows Terminal is a new and open-source command-line application for Windows 10, built for the Command Prompt, PowerShell, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and more. It's fast, modern, and configurable thanks to its GPU-accelerated rendering, excellent UTF-8 support, and JSON-based configurability, and this book can help you learn how to leverage these features. You’ll start by learning the benefits of Windows Terminal and its open-source development, as well as how to use the built-in tabs, panes, and key bindings to build your own efficient terminal workflows. After you’ve mastered Windows Terminal, this book shows how to use and configure PowerShell Core and the Windows Subsystem for Linux within Windows Terminal. You’ll maximize your productivity using powerful tools such as PSReadLine for PowerShell and ZSH on Linux, and discover useful tips and tricks for common developer tools like Git and SSH. Finally, you’ll see how Windows Terminal can be used in common development and DevOps tasks, such as developing frontend JavaScript applications and backend REST APIs, and managing cloud-based systems like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. By the end of this book, you'll not only be well-versed with Windows Terminal, but also have learned how to effectively use shells like PowerShell Core and ZSH to become proficient at the command line.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introducing the New Windows Terminal
5
Section 2: Configuring your Windows Terminal and its shells
12
Section 3: Using your Windows Terminal for development

Using ZSH

To make configuration a little easier, we'll be using oh-my-zsh to configure much of our ZSH experience. It's worth keeping in mind, however, that everything we do in this section is possible without oh-my-zsh; oh-my-zsh simply provides bundles of ZSH configurations with reasonable defaults. The real workhorse is ZSH!

For example, ZSH provides a useful up-line-or-beginning-search option, which is often left unused. If we enable this option, when we type some text at the prompt and press the up arrow, ZSH will search through our history for the typed text. Installing oh-my-zsh will automatically enable this option.

Let's walk through some of the options available in ZSH. After that, we'll discuss what oh-my-zsh adds on top of ZSH, both out of the box and via plugins.

Rerunning earlier commands

Like PowerShell, ZSH provides multiple ways to rerun earlier commands, so we don't need to retype them or press the up arrow repeatedly to find some...